Revisiting IBM Systems Director

As complexity increases, we find that we need better tools to manage our machines. If we're only responsible for one or two machines, then logging in and leaving topas or vmstat running in a few xterm windows might make sense. Managing these smaller environments probably isn't very challenging. However, if you're dealing with many different physical and virtual machines, logical partitions, the HMC, VIO servers, etc., management and administration can become much more complex and cumbersome. Then add to the puzzle the physical x86 servers running VMware and providing the opportunities to run vmotion or live partition mobility. Now you need to track where LPARs are physically running.

IBM's solution for dealing with these challenges is IBM Systems Director.

I recently attended an IBM Systems Director workshop where I listened to lectures and participated in hands-on lab exercises with Director 6.1. I had seen 6.1 before, and I've read announcements and articles about it, but I hadn't spent much time working in depth with it. If your only exposure to Systems Director is the 5.2 version, check into this workshop. It can help you see the benefits of using IBM Systems Director 6.1 to manage your computing environment. As IBM says, this is a workshop, not a class.

This is from the Web site:

"IBM is presenting these workshops to give participants the information needed to be successful in the implementation, use and maintenance of an IBM Systems Director management environment. This includes the use of IBM systems management tools and utilities including IBM Systems Director."

Go view the schedule and see if a workshop is headed to your area. It's well worth a moment of your time.

More from IBM:

"The workshop will include discussions, presentations, videos, demonstrations and hands-on activities. Topics will vary based on time considerations and attendee interest. There is no cost for participation in the workshop."

In my workshop we had access to a laptop loaded with VMware. It had a total of three virtual machines preinstalled: one ran Systems Director, another a Windows operating system with a Systems Director agent running on it, and the third ran agentless. Among other tasks, we were able to log-on and run discovery to find devices, request access to machines so that Systems Director could log in, run inventory on the systems to get more information about them, set up alerts based on criteria that we are interested in, manage updates for the different systems, remotely install System Director agents on systems we wanted to manage, set up Systems Director user access, etc.

If you can't get to a workshop yourself, you can still browse various resources devoted to System Director, including frequently asked questions and links to videos and the CD that are handed out during the workshops.

Go here and here to download and install the actual IBM Systems Director product.

Here's IBMer Greg Hintermeister describing the installation process in an article he wrote earlier this year:

"IBM Systems Director integrates the embedded AIX console tasks for extending AIX operating system management. From the Power Systems Management summary page, select 'AIX systems' under the operating systems category. From here, right-click an operating system to select the AIX web console to launch. One new task in the AIX console is the health task, which shows system configuration values and graphs of key performance metrics, as well as the top processes and file systems in use."

I'd heard for some time that IBM Systems Director 6.1 is new and improved compared to the 5.2 version. Now I know, thanks to the workshop. I encourage you to look more closely at the product--download it, install it, use it. Then post your own thoughts in Comments.

Comments

[Vincent Jamart]

I have lots of problems with SD Server 6.1.1.02 on an AIX 6.1TL3.

It's quite hard to make it work correctly on a medium park (+100LPARs). It's not NAT-friedly for its platform agent. Also, system discovery with multiple HMC sometimes ends with "partial authentication" (be carefull with SLP protocols for instance).

It uses the same tcp port as ISC for TSM5.5 (both having their own LWI and each consuming +2Gb of memory,...thanks WebSphere)

SD must be installed on a dedicated system, also because it doesn't support being installed within a WPAR nor on a NIM server. So consider duplicate your disk space to store the same BFFs on different systems (your lppsource and /opt/ibm/director/data/updateslib/AIX).
LDAP authentication is a nightmare (just refer to this topic in the RedBook...)

Sometimes when downloading updates, SD writes temporary files under /, creating a /usmi/updates/data/Director directory out of /opt/ where you installed SD and then filling up directly the / filesystem at the same time (inherance of being developped in Java for a Windows system using only a "c:" filesystem?!).

In my opinion SD 5.20 was more reliable and also had a "software deployment" option (licensed) that has disapeared in SD 6.1 (you now have to buy another Tivoli tool for that feature!).

I'm now waiting for SD 6.2 hoping it to be improved on the above issues (plus support for PowerHA and WPAR mobility). My upgrade study is slowly evolving since feb.2009 with the advices of IBM STGlab but at this moment I'm not considering SD6.1 mature for a production environment already using SD 5.20.1.

[Mark]

Hi,

I am trying to install this product and I have problems with the client installation.
Can you tell me when AIX client has its System Director Agent logs?

Thanks,

Mark